The present invention relates to a system and method for autonomous avatar driver, and more particularly an autonomous avatar driver capable of natural language processing for improved data querying and enhanced knowledge representation for avatars, virtual healthcare advisors, virtual personal assistants and non player characters within video games, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), virtual worlds, online social networks, and virtual classrooms. The autonomous avatar driver may also be enabled to mine dialog for data that may then be utilized to generate recommendations to a user.
The number of active subscribers to MMOGs is at least 10 million people. Each person pays $15 and up a month to play these games, and maybe and additional 20 million people login occasionally. Estimates are that players spent about $1 billion in real money in 2005 on virtual goods and services for MMOGs combined. Moreover, at least 1.5 million people subscribe to virtual worlds. In January, 2006, inside one such virtual social world, people spent nearly $5 million in some 4.2 million transactions buying or selling clothes, buildings, and the like. Moreover, participants in web communities number in the multiple tens of millions. Additionally, traditional video games have sold over $30 billion in goods since 2000.
Many of these games and virtual environments are coming to rely on believable characters as an integral part of the story, and as video game players come to expect increasingly believable scenarios, the characters must improve as well. Integral to believable characters is their ability to comprehend conversation and exhibit a knowledge base.
Currently, knowledge representation is fatally limited by resource and financial shortcomings. Data required for knowledge representation may be incorporated into databases in particular formats to be usable for knowledge representation. Such a system is cumbersome, requiring large numbers of man-hours, often with costly specialists, and huge amounts of storage for the data. Infallibly, despite these huge expenditures, the data set created for the knowledge representation will be incomplete, leading to palpable gaps in the “knowledge” of the character.
A natural language process that is able to examine external data sources, and glean relevant data may provide far more cost efficient, complete and adaptable data sources for knowledge representation is currently lacking. For games, virtual worlds and narratives, such knowledge representation may become essential to the success of the product.
Moreover, personal avatars may likewise benefit from knowledge representation as knowledgeable personal assistants, and more fully developed player characters. The present invention allows for this level of expanded knowledge representation.
Additionally, a natural language interface may allow substantially improved searching for relevant frequently asked questions and general data queries. Such improvements have considerable implications for education, healthcare and corporate relations. Current data queries examine matches of words rather than matches of meaning Natural language processing may improve these searching methods by incorporating semantics.
Additionally, such advanced contextual search techniques may be extended to avatar dialog to generate highly targeted data mining. Such data mining may be useful for advertisement, user recommendations and statistical data farming.
It is therefore apparent that an urgent need exists for a system and method for an automated avatar driver with contextual recommendation ability. This system would be able to provide highly believable virtual personalities for personal and corporate use.